Cynthia Guthrie says she once asked Peter Murrell, then the SNP’s chief executive, where the party’s missing referendum money was. “He actually looked in the mid-distance and pointed and said ‘I can see it’,” she told LBC. “I found myself peering upwards like this in my laptop and said I can’t see it.”
Guthrie and Allison Graham have now spoken publicly about what followed. They were two of three nationalists on the SNP’s Finance and Audit Committee who resigned in early 2021 after Murrell would not open the books to them. Both accuse senior party figures, among them Nicola Sturgeon, Kirsten Oswald and Heather Anderson, of shutting down their concerns. The Scottish Daily Express reported that former SNP Women’s Convener Caroline McAllister has called on John Swinney to resign.
Questions about the money
Independence supporters were asking at the time about £660k of ring-fenced funds for a second referendum. Guthrie said there was “a lot of disquiet about funds that couldn’t be accounted for properly.” When she pressed Murrell on whether the sum was about £700,000, he replied that it was £582,000. Asked where it was, he gave the answer above.
Graham described the exchanges differently. “It was like watching a bad magician trying to distract you from things,” she said. “It was really odd.”
The meeting of March 20, 2021
The dispute came to a head at an online meeting of the party’s National Executive Committee on March 20, 2021. Graham read out a statement announcing the resignations. She accused Murrell of “obvious procrastination”, said the committee had been given contradictory information and had “no way” of providing “scrutiny and governance”.
Highlands councillor Ian Cockburn then attacked her, she said. “He didn’t know me but eviscerated my character and opened the floodgates for the attack on me,” Graham recalled. She said he left her feeling “like a daft lassie.” In the meeting chat, she said, Sturgeon, then First Minister, wrote to him: “Well said, Ian.”
Sturgeon later joined the video call. “It felt very threatening to me personally because it was to close down what I had said and make sure nobody else asked any questions,” Graham said. According to the account, Sturgeon told members to be “very careful about suggestions that there are problems with the party’s finances, because we depend on donors to donate.”
Other members piled on, Graham said, Oswald, now the Minister for Victims, among them. Anderson, now an SNP MSP, suggested a “new hashtag, I’mwithIan”. Graham told the Scottish Sun it felt like “being bullied in the playground” and said nobody backed her up. Asked whether Sturgeon had bullied her, she answered that she was “bullied by them all.”
Who was to blame
Swinney and other SNP figures have described the party as a victim of Murrell’s criminal conduct. Guthrie rejects that framing. “It’s not good enough to say he was a master criminal and everybody else was a victim,” she said. She told the police she had seen no evidence of criminality, only attempts to close things down, and argued that public assurances from Sturgeon, Swinney and Oswald that all was well emboldened Murrell. His wife saying everything was fine, she said, “was like giving a child the key to a chocolate shop.”
The Express said Swinney had appeared on BBC Scotland to deny any problem with the party’s finances while the embezzlement, which it dates from 2010 to 2022, was going on. Sturgeon has not responded to the allegations about her conduct.
An SNP spokesperson told LBC that Swinney held no party position and sat on no NEC during the period in question. His remarks, the spokesperson said, simply set out what any member would expect of the financial scrutiny provided for under party rules. The party has overhauled its governance procedures under his leadership, the statement added, and Oswald as Business Convener had ensured NEC updates were posted on the party website. “The criminal wrongdoing of Peter Murrell was uncovered by a complex and extensive police investigation years after the events in question,” the spokesperson said. “The SNP was the victim of that wrongdoing.”
